20 YEARS ON THE WALL: Southeast art professor Ronald Clayton subject of retrospective

Southeast Missouri State University houses many treasures on its River Campus. The Crisp Museum showcases collections from all over the world, from paintings to sculpture and archaeology.

Southeast professor of painting and drawing Ronald V. Clayton has seen many exhibits pass through Southeast's halls in his 21 years of teaching. Now his art will be the focus as the university presents "Ron Clayton: Retrospective," an exhibition spanning 20 years of paintings by Clayton.

The retrospective runs through Jan. 24 at the Crisp Museum, which is free and open to the public.

Clayton's paintings are a hybrid of sorts. A free-spirited painter who embraces the abstract, Clayton also feels a deep bond with the landscapes he has become familiar with over the years, from Korea to the Southwestern United States and Midwestern backyards.

"I always thought of myself as an abstract painter," Clayton said. "Then I quietly realized, mainly through teaching it, that perspective has its place, and can be used as abstractly as all of the other elements of spatial painting.

"My artwork follows the very conflict of our man-made world versus the natural world," Clayton said. "As you can see in the retrospective, the last 20 years has seen me move from a heavier, more industrial abstract to 'open the windows,' so to speak, and bring the natural elements out more."

Clayton's art emphasizes the man vs. nature conflict. He paints a picture and then constructs a metal frame over the image to create the feel that the viewer is inside a building, looking out.

"The landscapes you see through the doors and windows of the building shells are painted nearly true to life, capturing places I know," Clayton said. "I like to find cities and man-made places and paint them back to their elemental, natural roots, before man changed them."

Though most post-modern painters agree that abstract and realism are polar opposites, bringing them together as Clayton does in his work creates a hybrid -- a post-modern approach to spatial art.

"My later pieces are evolving more toward nature as I feel that the world is, too," Clayton said. "Slowly but surely we are watching as the mammoths of our civilization shake and crumble, and from the dust we are emerging as a stronger people. We can look across through the shells of our broken towers and see the world for what it is, for what it was."

Raised in Salt Lake City, Clayton said he grew up around beautiful landscapes and felt a bond with nature. He met his wife during his military service in Korea, and they returned there 30 years later for an artist-in-residency program. Some of the landscapes in his work over the last nine years feature some of the Korean landscape he said they both love.

Clayton taught at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro before arriving at Southeast in 1989. As a teacher, he said he doesn't force his own artistic beliefs on his students.

"I teach them techniques that they can adapt and reinvent for themselves," Clayton said. "I encourage the students to find their own voice, whether it is painting in the traditional sense of brush and canvas or taking on the digital media that has become its own modern art form," Clayton said.

Clayton's art is exhibited and collected widely in the U.S. and abroad, and pieces came from all around the country for the retrospective. Then-museum curator Stanley Grand chose the paintings to represent the last 20 years of Clayton's art.

"You have to put something like this in another's hands," Clayton said. "What you might think is a great painting might not be that great; it's like a mother's love, so to speak."

More information as well as images of Clayton's artwork are available at www.ronaldclayton.com.